A Tall History of Sugar. Curdella Forbes
"Is Sylvia Pettigrew an Lionel Harper wen inna di grassroot yessideh. Dem did a-do badniss," the girl said, without apparent rhyme or reason.
She broke his concentration. This time she had spoken aloud, which she almost never did. His eyes opened wide; with fascination and fear, his imagination shifted to the other side of the land bordering the school grounds. This section was prohibited as well. At the border between the school and the red river was the dry-stone gateway over which a log was laid like a bridge. The gate led out into a bow-shaped clearing encircled by trees that gave it an intimate and eerie feeling.
The trees were the first thing that made it impossible to keep the children away from that place, despite prohibition. They were naseberry trees, which fruited in the summer just before school was out. The succulent brown fruit fell and broke on the ground with a splash and turned bees, flies, and children luminescent with desire. Beyond the shadow cast by the trees was the slope that the teachers feared and fought unsuccessfully by prohibitions to keep the children from haunting. There the sun blazed unhindered from an open sky and they could slide flailing on coconut branches down to the river, or play at hide-and-seek in the tufts of guinea grass that grew in abundance all the way down. The guinea grass was where the bad children like Lionel Harper and Sylvia Pettigrew misbehaved themselves, showing their cheelies and cocobreads and doing other things to which his imagination could not assign a concrete image.
"Sandra chat. Shi tell Man-Teacher dis mawnin. Man-Teacher go bus dem ass wid pepper-lick." She flashed her hand in the motion that meant a beating, clicking her thumb and index finger together. They made a sound like a whip. She returned her hand to her navel and continued kicking, finger-sucking. Sandra welshed on them and now Man-Teacher is going to give them a serious beating, a bust-arse. The thought delivered an extraordinary satisfaction.
He shivered, shocked at the news and, as always, at the daring of her language. She was never afraid to swear out of the hearing of adults, whereas he censored even his dreams. He was so afraid to dream that he struggled every night not to fall asleep. He dreamed of a large gray mattress coming in the night, scooping him up and whirling him far away from his mother, while he stretched out his hands to her, crying, but his mother was in the other room and did not hear. He dreamed this dream often when his parents fought, and he thought his mother would be killed; he thought his father would kill her.
"Shhh. Look deh. Look deh." The gossip over, she had returned to speaking to him without words. He always heard the echo in his head, clear as his own voice.
The hen had raised its behind in the bed of straw and the round brown egg was protruding from its extended anus, which was pushing it out with quick, pulsating movements. It fell out and the children thought "Plop!" in unison, their eyes shining with the unbearable thrill that never waned no matter how often they watched this event which was to them a vast miracle.
"Shi go dweet again," the boy whispered in his head, breathing through his mouth, and sure enough the hen raised herself again, the process was repeated, and soon two bright speckled eggs lay like jewels in the straw. This had never happened before. The children heaved a mutual sigh of satisfaction, long drawn out, in tandem, first she, "Hah," and then he, "Hah." The hen started cackling, announcing the birth. The rooster, cockadoodledoing loudly, announced his accomplishment, beating his wings and springing down on top of another of the hens. The gaggle scattered, calling and protesting in outrage.
The children had seen this mating a hundred times before and were not at all as interested in it as they were in the miracle of the egg being born. Still, they liked to watch as the rooster tried to anchor the next hen's head in place with his beak, before wriggling on and then off her. This wriggling to them was stupid, unsatisfactory; they thought he looked ridiculous, and sometimes he did not catch the hen, but this time he did.
Recess was almost over. They could hear it in the receding quality of the schoolyard noise. Soon the bell would ring. Another silence descended, but not as secure. They were waiting for the bell, which they could hear before it rang, a jangling noise that made their bellies feel stiff and unwell. Slightly shocked, a little lost, they stood up and began to tidy themselves. She straightened her pleats with meticulous care and patted her braids to make sure they were staying down, which they were not, but pressing them down made her feel she had tidied away her and Moshe's secrets. It was like putting things away inside a secret drawer, where inquisitive people could not find them. Struggling to stuff his uniform shirt into his short pants, he was clumsier. She helped him as the bell rang, dusting him down with quick pats of her hands, removing imaginary fluff.
They dawdled behind the crowds pressing toward the schoolhouse doorway, a headlong rush that braked at the steps and slowed to a massed shuffling punctuated by quick, urgent whispers, shovings, angry hisses, and finally silence as the man-teacher appeared in the doorway to inspect the perfect lines and the hush into which the rowdy mass had resolved itself at the door.
He stood erect and tall—to the littler children, a colossus—a great high-brown man with a bullet head, flexing, with slow, deliberate movements, the cane that was the same color as himself, while his eyes, the color of fresh molasses at the bottom of a gourdie, surveyed the pack with a libidinous gleam, waiting to catch just one out of line. He caught two, shirt out of pants or imperfectly tucked, and the cane descended with gusto, raising a vague dust from the flour-bag drawers the boys wore beneath their short khaki pants.
One boy leaped from side to side, sticking his bottom out to deflect the force of the blows. He got a double portion for his pains.
The other boy, more savvy, merely roared for mercy, standing still except for the staccato jerking of his body each time the lash descended. "Mi mumma, mi mumma! Woie, Teacha, Man-Teacha, mi nah go dweet again. Mek mi put in mi shirt inna mi pants, Teacha, duu, Teacha, duu!"
Man-Teacher gave him a few more as well, for creating shame and disgrace on his school. "Boy! Anybody killing goat around here? You is goat? Anybody cutting your throat? This is a school, not a abattoir! Stop your cow-bawling!"
But the other, who was guilty of the greater crime of evading punishment, got a greater portion of licks.
A few girls giggled, amused by the triple entertainment: the boy leaping and calling "Sight!" while he stuck his bottom out so that he was contorted almost in the shape of a saddle; the other calling down God from the cross and bawling for his mother to convince the man-teacher that he was dropping dead from the licks. Above all, they were amused by the way the licks exposed the boys' poverty. With every fall of the cane, flour dust rose in the air. Only the very poor, which none would admit was most of them, wore flour-bag drawers, and who wore them was a secret poorly kept—exposed by the man-teacher's zealous cane, for no matter how well the mothers washed, some stubborn residue of flour remained, and flaked up in an aerial smoke when the cloth was beaten.
No one confessed to the crime of giggling, so the head teacher distributed a rain of licks on the heads, shoulders, and breasts of the girls standing in the general vicinity of the giggles. After this, Man-Teacher sweating in streams, the children were allowed to chant in unison, "Thank you, God, for work and play, and all the good things you give us every day," before proceeding inside in an orderly manner, dispersing into their various classrooms, which were separated from each other not by doors but by folding blackboards, so that the activities of all the classes, which included many chants of lessons learned by rote, resonated, with astonishingly musical cadence, throughout all the other classes and the doorways of the school.
Holding fast to Moshe's hand as they crouched without crouching at the back of the line (Man-Teacher beat for poor posture), Arrienne could feel him trembling beside her. She squeezed his hand in their secret signal, and as his fingers squeezed hers in return, the great wings unfurled and pushed them forward and they plunged, invisible, into the darkness of their classroom where, with instinct and without sight, they found their bench (three children to a bench fastened to one desk) and slid onto it without speaking to the third child, who was already sitting there. The wings that made them invisible also robbed them of sight for the small moment that the miraculous protection lasted.
Man-Teacher, counting the children streaming inside to make sure all were present, missed two, but his eyes were blinded from the sun and he thought he'd